"We are not going out."
The formula implies mourning, and yet the clothes both of Elizabeth and her mother are unmistakably coloured ones, and give no indication of an even moderately recent loss. But it is so clear that Miss Le Marchant means to add no explanation that he has to change the subject.
"Though Bertie is not an old friend," he says, smiling, "yet I have come across one here to-day—she opened the door to me; I should have liked to shake hands with her, only she looked so haughty—she never used to look haughty at the Moat."
"Do you mean nurse?" she asks.
"Yes, I knew her in an instant; she is not in the least changed, less even"—hesitating a little, as if doubtful whether the stiffness of their new relations warranted a personality—"less even than you."
She snatches a hasty look at him, a look upon which he sees, to his surprise, imprinted a character of almost fear.
"You must be laughing at me," she says, in a voice in which he detects an undoubted tremor; "I am very much changed."
There is such obvious apprehension in her whole manner, that his one thought—after a first flash of astonishment—is to reassure her.
"Of course I was only speaking of externals," he says quickly; "ten years could hardly be expected to leave any of us quite where we were as to our inner selves;" then, seeing her still look flurried, and becoming himself nervous, he adds, rather stupidly, the hackneyed Swinburnian couplet—
"'Time turns the old days to derision,
Our loves into corpses or wives!'